If you were out and about last Thursday night, or even if you were at home watching TV, it was probably made very apparent to you that a lot of people get really excited about the coming of the New Year. Well, here at the Winos we say “bah humbug.” It’s just a number, after all, and it’s totally arbitrary — but that doesn’t stop plenty of people from drinking quite a lot of alcohol to commemorate its arrival. Therefore, since we’re all obviously willing to drink to excess in honor of random numbers, this week’s meeting will feature such a theme.

On Wednesday night, bring any bottle with a number in its name. Please note, the number has to be in the wine’s actual name, not just on the label. Every bottle has numbers on its label, as mandated by law (the volume of wine contained, the alcohol percentage, and the good ol’ vintage, to name a few), but comparatively fewer bottles have numbers in their actual names. Your job is to seek them out.

Some suggestions:

Bin or Lot numbers. Sometimes wineries will allocate certain parts of their production runs for special treatment — a different kind of aging, superior barrels, whatever. Or sometimes the presence of a “bin” or “lot” number on a bottle indicates that the grapes are from a special plot of the vineyard designated as unique in some way.Cameron Hughes. This American negociant is well-known for his sequentially-numbered series of small-batch bottlings. We’ve reviewed his wines twice (here and here), and they were always big winners.Weird stuff. One of our favorite bottles of all time was the De La Montanya “1812” Zinfandel, so named because the wine in one barrel unexpectedly fermented all the way to an unprecedented 18.12% alcohol. Wineries love naming their special bottlings after freaky shit like that.

Admittedly, the last time we did a random catch-all theme like this (“bottles with animals on the label“), the results were less than stellar. Hopefully the winemakers of the world treat their “numbered” bottles a bit more seriously than the animal ones. We’ll see.

This week’s meeting will be held at Jason’s apartment in Brentwood. The RSVP system functions like this: if you want in, you simply click on the “will attend” button on the right-hand side. I’ll e-mail you a confirmation e-mail the day of the event, and you’re good to go!

Good luck scoring big in the numbers department! We’ll see you merry revelers on Wednesday at 9pm.